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That was bonkers! I honestly thought I wouldn’t get it done this week. It pretty much went like this:

1 day basking in the glory of my awesome game development skills.

3 days trying to get my head around how music is made

1 day trying to find a piece of music making software that was actually a bit of music-making software and not a cleverly disguised advert for a bit of music-making software.

1 day “Researching” music on Youtube,

About 4 hours cobbling together a pathetic tune to meet deadline.

And I made it! It’s the most half-hearted insult to ears everywhere, but it’s done, dammit!

So here’s what Iearned (or re-learned – bear in mind I haven’t picked up a musical instrument since I was 8 years old!):

Music is made up of notes

Notes can be combined to form chords

Chords can be arranged into ‘Progressions’

Tunes are made up of beats

Depending on the beat notation, there are a set number of beats in each bar

Tunes are usually composed of a bass line, a melody and percussion

So, what did I do for my tune? Well, by the time I had learned all of this it was 3pm on Sunday, so I clubbed together what I could, but the basics are:

I used the Key of C, which means I used the following chords for the bass line, in this order:

C – G – F – C – G – F – C – C

The melody was basically me playing around with the notes in each chord. I wish I could be more technical, but I simply mucked about until my ears stopped bleeding.

The percussion was as simple as could be:

Dum – – – Tish – – – Dum – – – Tish – – – REPEAT!

And that’s about it! I’m not overly impressed with the results, but it’s a start! And besides, we’re here to make games, not music! Yeah! Let’s run with that!

NEXT GOAL:

I’m going to change things up a bit. The main focus should be on me trying to learn Java, so that I don’t fall into the trap of distracting myself with non-game related topics. After all, I’m not a game developer unless people are playing what I make! So, each week I will set myself a Java development goal, and supplement it with other goals for the other topics. I will still talk about them, but they’ll be side attractions, supplementing the main freakshow that is me idly pawing at the keyboard in the hope that magic will happen.

So, my next goal is: Create a game that contains the following:

RPG elements

Combat

Flavour text

That’s it! There are about a dozen programming concepts I need to do to make this work, but if I do it right, it should be a playable game! It will force me to use multiple classes, inheritance and some other concepts that I need to learn, but that I might avoid if I keep things too simple.

Cheers me dears!

PS: As soon as I figure out where I can upload my music to stream, I’ll stick up a widget so you can hear the aural assault for yourself. Ta!